Free Translator Translated by Anita Desai Page B

were dropping into the scraggly branches of the lopped tree below with exhausted squawks. Would she allow herself to be dragged into the gloom by it all once again? Heaving the cloth satchel off her shoulder (which had become permanently lowered by its familiar weight), she determined she would not. Letting spill the book she had shown Tara—which had so miraculously caught Tara's eye—she ran her fingers lightly over its smeared and smudged cover because that was where Tara had thought to run hers, and then opened it out on the table where she worked, ate, wrote and arranged her books, papers and pens. Without even fetching herself a glass of water or sitting down to rest, she read the first few lines to herself and once again the syllables of that language evoked the distant world which linked her to the writer.
    It was the place where her father had been posted, briefly, as a junior officer in government service, and where he had met and married her mother, his landlady's daughter—to the horror and consternation of his family, who had never imagined such a thing as an inter-caste marriage between its strict boundaries, and to the sorrow and foreboding of hers, equally strict within its own limits—then brought her back with him to the city. It was in her earliest years, steadily growing more distant, more remote in its wrappings of nostalgia, that Prema had heard her mother speak to her and sing to her in her language (only when her father was not present; he could not tolerate it once he was back where he belonged, in the capital). But after her mother's early death (hadn't her family foretold it,
exactly
this?) Prema had lost contact with what was literally her mother tongue. Then recovered it by choosing to study the language at an adult education evening class during a slack period in her life, after receiving her degree in English literature, a respectable but common qualification.
    Not content to stop there, for some reason she could not explain to her father or his family who considered it an aberration, unfathomable in someone given the opportunity to take up any line of study at any college she chose, she decided it was imperative that she visit the region where Oriya was a spoken, living language. Her teacher, a preternaturally mild and soft-spoken man, dangerously thin and withdrawn, had offered, on hearing her plan, a baffled smile which confirmed that no previous student of his had ever responded in this way to the evening classes he gave so timidly and tentatively, in an almost empty classroom made available in a local, underfunded school for such lost souls as herself. He seemed unsure whether to congratulate her or warn her.
     
    She remembered with what trepidation she had made her travel arrangements—if one could use the term 'arrangement' for such a haphazard journey involving many changes from broad-to narrow-gauge railway, then country buses, finally a choice of horse-drawn tonga or bicycle rickshaw—and how warily she had faced her time in a women's hostel at a local college, no more than a scattering of brick barracks in a dusty field. There was a tea stall under a drooping neem tree where she kept herself alive on tea and biscuits through the many slow, stifling days she had to spend there before the language lifted itself off the pages of her textbook and assumed once again the mobility, the unselfconscious agility it had once had for her. Almost to her surprise, it slowly became recognisable in the speech of the tea-stall owner, the cycle-rickshaw driver and the women in the hostel with whom she shared a bathroom—a row of stalls along a perpetually wet and dripping hall—and whom she ran into after classes were over and there were empty evenings to while away.
    Turning the pages of the limp little paperback, running her eyes over the script, she thought with a kind of guilty nostalgia of the homesickness she had suffered for the city, for its comforts and conveniences rather, and how she